This chapter is from the book

After you’ve decided how you want to include digital marketing in your overall marketing strategy, it’s time to produce a formal plan—a B2B digital marketing plan. Such a plan is an important roadmap for your digital marketing activities, and a way to measure the success of these activities.

For many B2B companies, digital marketing is a new thing. You don’t want to blindly enter into these new marketing activities; you need to know what you’re doing and why, and what your goals are. That’s why a digital marketing plan is the essential first step in implementing your B2B marketing strategy.

Why You Need a Digital Marketing Plan

I’m going to assume that, as a B2B marketing professional, you know all about marketing plans—why they’re important, how to create one, and how to make best use of the plan in your day-to-day activities. Well, a digital marketing plan is much like a traditional marketing plan, just tweaked for digital media; the focus is on those online activities that contribute to your overall business goals.

An effective digital marketing plan is a roadmap to success. It forces marketing personnel (and your company’s senior management) to embrace a set of common goals, strategies, and tactics; it keeps staff from going rogue, or from undertaking irrelevant or unwanted activities. It also encourages staff to think in terms of both internal and external goals, and to utilize the appropriate marketing vehicles to accomplish those goals.

A digital marketing plan is also necessary to achieve internal support for your online marketing activities. You know as well as anyone how difficult it can be to get some management comfortable with shifting from traditional media to digital media; some of the old guard is naturally adverse to change. To that end, a digital marketing plan is something you can put in front of senior management to let them know what you hope to accomplish, and to negotiate for the resources to accomplish those goals.

Finally, a digital marketing plan is a tool you can use to measure your accomplishments. A good marketing plan includes quantifiable goals, whether financial (revenues or profits) or market-oriented (market share, website traffic, and so on). How close you come to meeting or exceeding those goals determines how successful your marketing activities have been.

One Plan or Two?

In this chapter, we’re understandably focusing on digital marketing plans—a plan for your digital marketing activities. But do you want a digital marketing plan separate from your normal marketing plan, or should one all-encompassing marketing plan include both traditional and digital marketing activities?

I can go either way on this one. On one hand, having a separate digital marketing plan focuses attention on those activities that are probably newer and more difficult for many B2B companies. Viewing digital as something separate helps to provide the focus you might need to jump-start your online activities.

On the other hand, your digital marketing activities should not be wholly separate from traditional marketing activities. Everything you do should be related and closely coordinated; what you do in one medium affects what you do in another. (That’s called integrated marketing, and it’s key to success.) Your customers ultimately view you as a combination of what you project in all your marketing activities; digital should not be approached as something different from your other forms of marketing.

Perhaps the best approach, then, is to include a separate digital marketing section in your larger overall marketing plan. This enables you to plan holistically, while still focusing attention on your digital activities. It gives you the best of both worlds, planning-wise.